(452) Inoculating Nonsense

Professor Dan Bedford is from the faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Weber State University. His work is largely involving climate and society and is a contributor to many climate change related projects including the FREE Climate Denial MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) offered by The University of Queensland. His colleague John Cook runs this course which has already enrolled more than 10,000 students via the online platform. We talk to Professor Bedford about his research into why combatting climate denial with more science has not just been ineffective, but in many cases just reinforces the existing beliefs of the denier. We also ask Dan to share some of the techniques he has curated to combat this via exposing students to weak forms of denier arguments that are more transparent than some of the more complicated versions as a method to help train people how to identify bad arguments by themselves which has proved much more effective.

Read the DeSmogBlog article by John Cook that inspired this interview here.

Learn more and sign up (or perhaps you know someone who needs this) for the FREE online course here.

Second Up is Rob Shirkey, Executive Director of Our Horizon. Our Horizon works with volunteers, municipal and even provincial and state governments to adopt cigarette like warning labels on gas pumps, warning of the consequences of climate inaction. Rob has been on the show before, but since then Our Horizon has met with quite a bit of success including having the motions passed by several municipal governments, and being covered by multiple major news outlets in Canada.

If you missed our earlier video interview with Rob you can do that here.